Step right up to Politicsville, USA

Saturday 14 June 2008 19.01 EDT
First published on Saturday 14 June 2008 19.01 EDT

I have been in Washington, DC, for the past few weeks finishing a film. Someone once described Washington as 'Hollywood for Ugly People' and there is a sense as you stroll around the city that this is a one-industry town, filled with gawky-looking individuals hellbent on writing policy papers and amending anything that moves. Streets are laid out in a grid system, with numbers and single capital letters for names; it's the only place where people's addresses sound like chess moves. ('I'll meet you at the corner of H and 22nd.' 'OK, then I'll see you tonight at Tetrahedron 5 on the corner of Z and Pi.' 'We're having a party five inches from 9, which means I can take your bishop.')

The government buildings are impressive from the outside, but inside little is spent on ornamentation. Long, wide, white corridors, intermittently dotted with American flags, lead off into the distance. This is a city designed for meetings. It's a low, purposeful place. And its purpose is politics. Everywhere you go there are politicians, aides to politicians, monuments to politicians and hotels putting up politicians and their hookers. It's like a constant festival of politics. It's Glastonbury in suits. At night, all the young staffers and policy wonks go and get blitzed at bars filled with journalists and bloggers and gossip about whose politics didn't work that day.

Meanwhile, the gift shops sell novelty trinkets about politics. I brought back an Obamarama car air-freshener and a set of Hillary Clinton nutcrackers (you put a walnut between her legs and squeeze).

And everywhere, there are statues of politicians. The Lincoln Memorial gazes from one end of the Mall to the Washington Monument at the other. On either side are monuments to Jefferson and FD Roosevelt. As I contemplated the marvellous serendipity of American history, that it could produce just enough great Presidents to map out a perfect square, it struck me that what distinguishes the UK from the US is how little we mythologise the political process. In America, if you are a President or a mayor, you're likely to have an airport named after you at some point or a fountain constructed in your memory.

In the UK, you get a peerage, which is a sort of living reward, but not much more impressive than being handed a cuckoo clock and useless when you're dead.

I can't imagine we would ever spend money on huge, immovable edifices to significant political figures. I can't see us, 50 years from now, queuing up to get into the Ian Paisley Rotunda or taking off from Ted Heath Airport. I can't imagine driving past a marble archway across which is written 'Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government', as David Steel once optimistically encouraged Liberal delegates, nor can I guess what the UK equivalent of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address will be. Maybe in a few decades, schoolchildren will stand up and recite Neil Kinnock's damning of the Militant Tendency: 'And it descended into the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, scuttling around in taxis handing out redundancy notices to their own workforce.'

But I doubt there'll be enough time for any other lessons. Maybe we'll see something erected for those few politicians who took a stand. A statue of a huge Robin Cook gazing down at us perhaps (he always did look like a small Abraham Lincoln) or maybe, just maybe, 100 years from now, there will be lines of people snaking their way, schoolkids in awe, grown-ups weeping in admiration, into a huge, white stone edifice constructed in memory of the one man who saved life and liberty in this country and remembered now as people pay their £20 entrance fee to walk into the David Davis Diorama.

Cheney's siren call

Washington is a mostly quiet city and very leafy. The place has a settled sense of purpose about it, but this is occasionally shattered by a screaming motorcade of 25 police cars and outriders wailing as they escort a line of black cars from one end of an avenue to another. Every time I asked someone what was going on, the reply was always: 'Oh, it's Dick Cheney.' Cheney's movements seem to eat up the entire DC police force, even when he's just moving about 50 feet.

This is curious. I had heard so much about how secretive Cheney is. He has a walk-in safe in his office and has asked Google Earth to eliminate all signs of where he lives. Surprising, then, that this paranoid terrorist target should feel the best way to keep as secure as possible is by having 25 motor vehicles blasting your whereabouts to everybody wherever you go.

In the film I was finishing, we featured a motorcade. We had some police standing by to add authenticity. We started rolling, but could never get up a decent speed because of the traffic lights at each block. Then one of the police leant into the car and said: 'D'you want me to turn my siren on? That'll let us though all the red lights.' It worked and it was also quite exciting.

Which made me wonder: does Dick Cheney ask the police to motorcade him wherever he goes, not for security reasons but because he is actually quite excited about it? Could it be that one of the worst men in the world has the disposition of a kid? And that he spends his day thinking of excuses to have to go 50 yards down the road? This may put an interesting slant on why he was so keen to start so many wars.

Five More Really Bad Headlines For Gordon Brown

1. Another Asian Earthquake Claims 10,000 Lives: Can It Get Any Worse For Gordon Brown?

2. Milky Way Galaxy Due to Collide With Andromeda Galaxy in 15 Billion Years' Time: It's Time This Prime Minister Stopped Dithering And Told Us What He's Going To Do, Says Cameron

3. Small Child With Hammer Falls Backwards Into Pond: Where Was Gordon Brown? Ask Parents

4. Brown Says Tories Are Hopelessly In Disarray Over David Davis Resignation: Brown Accused Of Plagiarism For Stealing Tories' Insults

5. Just When Gordon Brown Must Have Thought It Couldn't Get Any Worse, Nobel Prize Winning Mathematician Discovers A New Factor By Which It Can Get Worse